My good friend and business associate Chapel “Chap” Hazard is something of a living legend. One of those rare individuals who sucks the air out of a room and replaces it with the sweet, burning smell of sexy adventure, Chap is a person of interest in every sense of the word. Wanted for questioning in seventeen countries, a guest at the palace of a dozen others, Chap Hazard is a man’s man’s man with the heart of a child. Women want him, lions fear him, angels use his urine to make gunpowder for God. His potency is unrivaled, his hubris unequaled. He has never known doubt or fear. He can’t even spell them. Someday, he will conquer the world. Or stumble blindly off a cliff. Or, spectacularly, do both at once.

Hey hey hey! It’s been a while. I’ve been busy trying to secure a “sponsorship” for my upcoming mixtape, Cassette Trippin’, so that it reaches an audience wider than…well, than you, frankly. And, thanks to Kevin Beacham and the squad over at The Fifth Element, I appear to have gotten the help I need (more details coming soon). Which leaves me with exactly one free moment spend as I choose. Sadly, I’ve decided to use it writing about this week’s comics. Excelsior!

I hear a lot of rap music during my day. Some of it is made by my friends, some by famous people, some by strangers, some by myself. Most of it, frankly, is terrible. Well, maybe terrible is too strong a word, but…let’s go with it. Therefore, as a service to the public, I decided to jot down this list of common pitfalls that many modern hip-hop songs succumb to. You’re welcome. Oh, yeah, and if you think this is about you, it isn’t—don’t take it personally. Unless you should take it personally, in which case you really do need my help. Onward.

Unlike companies who claim to be the best, Autopoint settled on a more modest adjective.

Vulture Crash: Culture Out of Context

Once upon a time, erasers smelled awful. For each mistake made while transcribing your thoughts in already-painstaking analog longhand, you were forced to endure a visceral reminder of your error, even as you worked to remove it. With every corrective stroke, the vile rubber released a toxic odor like a tire fire in a barn full of animal farts. Forced to choose between inhaling that noxious emission and leaving their grammatical lapses intact, schoolchildren and counting-room clerks alike were everywhere driven to the brink of insanity. Truly, it was a terrible time to use a pencil.

Such a bust, another week where Ye Olde Pull List is only one comic long. What’s a nerd to do? I guess I’ll go back to figuring out why Dungeons & Dragons Online keeps crashing my computer. Um, that is, I’ll go back to stacking chips in the trap and laying bi**hes down flat. Farilla.

Hello. I’ve posted this picture of Batman crying to demonstrate my mind-state upon finding out that this week’s pull list is only one book long. I’m sure it says more about my recent buying habits than it does about the quality of today’s comics…but I’m not that sure. At any rate, it doesn’t make for a very stimulating column. Nonetheless, here we are.

“A place for everything, and everything in its place.” If you were working on the tag line for a hip new organizational product, that’s probably where you’d start conceptually, and then you’d move out from there into cooler, more current territory. Well, the good folks at folca must have burned out and brainstormed themselves into oblivion, because they came up with this bell-ringer: “If it always has folca an important thing will not forget.” So why did I buy it?

If you’re a Walking Dead fan (and if you aren’t, you just haven’t read it yet), then you know they screened a trailer for AMC’s upcoming TV adaptation at this year’s Comic-Con. I wasn’t there, and folks who were told me it looks promising.

So I watched the bootlegged version (it’s all over YouTube). Obviously, that isn’t the way this footage was meant to be seen, but it still concerns me. It all feels a little too…I dunno, “made for TV,” I guess. Plus, the book is in black and white (and gray), the impact of which can’t be underestimated. In a title that’s all about human frailty and moral ambiguity, the grayscale itself is a sort of subtle signifier. Technicolor doesn’t seem to make the same statement.

That’s why I was so pleased to find the above motion-comic footage, which is, to my mind, a much more satisfying way to make this story move (if they must). Yet I still contend that not every good book should be made into film of some sort. I think that’s ultimately missing the point of reading.

But enough of my yappin’. What’s new in the comic world? Tons of stuff, very little of which concerns me. Still, I have a whopping three books on my pull list this week, so let’s take a look at what awaits me behind the counter of Comics Unlimited today.

Anyone who wonders why San Diego’s Comic-Con is the largest convention in the Western hemisphere, look up. That’s why. From the footage that local news outlets were running of the convention floor, you would think this year’s theme was T & A. God bless the nerds and their weirdo libidos.

I bought this chewing gum at one of my local shops. It’s made by Lotte, which I believe is a Korean company. I could look into it further, but as I’ve said before, what kind of blog would this be if I did research?

The gum is intriguing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its colorful packaging. Even though I’m at a total loss to read the wrapper or to determine its contents, my initial reaction is to fall back on the universal law of food packaging–namely, that the product will taste like whatever is pictured on the package (hence, a bottle of ketchup boasts a shiny tomato). By that logic, this gum should taste like one of three things: jingle bells, anthropomorphic cats, or gold anthropomorphic cats. I just had to try it.